British television series 'Database': How to send an 'E mail' in 1984

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Nothing Lasts Forever: a low budget parody about a struggling artist

"Writer–director Schiller is best known for his short films from the early days of SNL and in 1984, together with producer Lorne Michaels, concocted this imaginative fantasy–comedy about true love, bad art, magical hobos, Carnegie Hall and space travel. Sweet, absurd and crammed with an incredible cast and countless hilarious moments of inspired brilliance, it was never released and never found the cult–audience it so rightfully deserved."

(Zack Carlson, 16 December 2012)

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Insanely Great Macintosh: Steve Jobs' 1984 Macintosh Introduction

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A Class Divided: Jane Elliott's daring classroom experiment

"On the day after Martin Luther King was killed, I––one of my students came into the room and said they shot a king last night, Mrs. Elliott, why'd they shoot that king? I knew the night before that it was time to deal with this in a concrete way, not just talking about it, because we had talked about racism since the first day of school. But the shooting of Martin Luther King, who had been one of our heroes of the month in February, could not just be talked about and explained away. There was no way to explain this to little third graders in Riceville, Iowa. ...

I decided at that point that it was time to try the eye color thing, which I had thought about many, many times but had never used. So the next day I introduced an eye color exercise in my classroom and split the class according to eye color. And immediately created a microcosm of society in a third–grade classroom."

(Jane Elliott, 1985, PBS)

Frontline "A Class Divided": Season 3, Episode 9, A Class Divided (26 Mar. 1985), Director: William Peters, Writers: Charlie Cobb, William Peters.

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Pre Certification Video

"A 'pre-cert video' (Pre-Certification) is any videotape (or laserdisc/CED) issued in the UK before the introduction of the 1984 Video Recordings Act.

Pre-cert videos were not required by law to be submitted to the BBFC so the era was unregulated, leading to many uncut releases of videos which would have fallen foul of the BBFC's strict guidelines, and would therefore have been censored if submission to the board was a legal requirement.

However, whilst many of the larger respectable companies simply issued their previously BBFC certificated cinema releases onto video to play safe as they feared there was bound to be a clampdown at some stage, some of the smaller independent companies decided to take advantage of the unregulated video rentals market by issuing 'strong uncut' versions depicting graphic violence and gore. A whole barrage of titles previously banned by the BBFC from getting a cinema release suddenly ended up uncensored on home video.

What began as a bill drafted by little known Luton Tory back bencher Graham Bright was made law after he and the tabloid press (most notably The Daily Mail) had successfully whipped the media into a frenzied hysteria over so-called 'video nasties'. Ban the Sadist Videos! was one of the more famous headlines they ran. When the bill was made law it became a legal requirement that all videotapes must be submitted to the BBFC for classification (and possible cuts).

The pre-cert video era is best remembered (amongst horror fans in particular) for the ensuing 'video nasty' debacle in which a selection of 72 videotapes were singled out and prosecuted by the DPP (Director of Public Prosecutions) under Section 2 or Section 3 of the OPA (Obscene Publications Act). Of these, 39 titles were deemed by the courts to be obscene and it's those titles which formed the final 'Video Nasties list."

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